With faith in God and academic love
Review by V.N. Datta

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES are reconstructions in retrospect. That is why I distrust them and their authenticity. They are remembrances of things past, and no one knows how much is suppressed in them and how for their account is coloured by prejudice. Who would have the courage to pour out his or her heart and make bold confessions about human foibles to which the flesh is heir. Life’s accounting in hard, but when dead, all is over!

The ancient Romans were pioneers in the cultivation of autobiographical writing. Marcus Porcius Cato (234 BC-194 BC), a Roman statesman, orator and first Latin prose writer of importance, felt his primary obligation to reflect on the interior darkness of the soul rather than to the external world of light and colour. The Arabs adopted the genre of autobiographical writing from the Romans and passed it on to Persia and India. Babur and his grandson Jehangir produced delightful memoirs waxing hyrical over their achievements, and the beauty of nature.

Raja Rammohan Roy produced his autobiographical sketch usually regarded as spurious, highlighting his intellectual debt to western learning and senses. Dabinderneth Tagore unfolded his spiritual quest and its travails in his autobiography. Mahatma Gandhi’s "Experiments with Truth", originally a collection of articles written in Gujarati, was a ceaseless quest for truth and God. Jawaharlal Nehru presented more a political history of his times than a story of his own life. In "Autobiography of an Unknown India", Nirad C. Chaudhuri lashed out at his compatriots with satire for their sins of commission and omission.

My forebear Sarla Devi Chaudhurani, wife of Ram Bhaj Datta, wrestled with her religious beliefs in her autobiography written in Bengali.

Women rarely take to autobiographical writing which is, I think, due to female diffidence. But that is not the case with Prabha Chopra, a noted historian, who has produced and published a small and unpretentious volume "My Life: Intuitions and Prenonious" (Deep and Deep Publications, New Delhi, pages 105).

Prabha Chopra claims this work not to be scholarly or a scientific treatise. Nor does it deal with social and political events of great importance. It is actions of small note but of enduring human value which are presented exquisitively with utmost sincerity in limpid style in this work. Prabha’s story is not the sob stuff, but a quiet journey, a sort of pilgrimage in quest of divine bliss. That is why intuitions, intimations and premonitions have vital significance in her own life.

Prabha recounts the story of her early life. Belonging to a middle class family of substantial means, she was brought up along with her brother and four sisters and educated at the Mission School and in Allahabad University. What is of special significance in the work is the profound religious spirit she has imbibed from the centuries-old Indian cultural tradition that is inextricably linked with the Ramayana, the holy Ganges and Hindu festivals. This deep and abiding religious faith in which millions of people in the Indo-Gangetic territory is not individual but cumulative, and is a priceless treasure of our cultural inheritance.

This profound spirit of religious faith Prabha Chopra has clung to firmly which has given her immense strength to weather many storms and face the reality of life boldly, feeling neither elated by worldly praise or neglect but bearing what came in her way with poise and dignity. Spiritual strength of which this writer has little understanding is not a commodity which can be picked, pocketed and sold at a grocer’s shop. It is terribly hard to strive for it in this topsy-turvy world. There is hardly anyone in the world who has not one trouble or the other.

According to Prabha Chopra, it is the faith in God that fortifies human will to bear suffering in life. What would be life like if God is expelled from the scheme of human existence? But it is not abject surrender that Chopra suggests but a meaningful endeavour for self-examination and self-realisation through trial and error which are the warp and woof of life.

The author narrates how her family felt shattered due to the sudden and tragic death of her brother and sister. These traumatic events she attributes to the non-observance of certain religious rituals which were considered imperative. With the death of his only son, her father could never be the same, and the memory of the grievous loss continued to rankle in his heart so long as he lived. When sorrow comes it comes in groups and there is no escape from them.

What comes out clearly in this work is Chopra’s faith in the incalculable force of prayer and this force has to act through human agency. Prayers offered to God with sincerity and devotion not only bring peace, solace and tranquility, but also help resolve many intricate problems one faces in life. It is a gross error to suppose that a prayer is a device to propitiate the heavenly powers for the gratification of personal interests. Tennyson wrote that more things are wrought by prayers than this world dreams of.

Chopra has given a vivid portrait of Allahabad University where she completed her MA in history. Allahabad University was doubtless a premier academic institution in the country until the early 70s of last country. The history department which had been founded by Lane Pool enjoyed a great reputation for learning and research which was further fostered and sustained by stalwarts like Sir Shafaat Ahmad Khan, Dr Tara Chand and Beni Prasad. The author’s own Ph.D supervisor, Dr Ishwari Prasad was easily one of the most popular historians of medieval India, whose text book on the medieval period became the best selling one in northern India.

After completing her Ph.D Chopra joined the Institute of Public Administration, Delhi, and established her credentials as a senior research scholar which subsequently led to the prestigious position of editor, Gazetteers in Delhi Administration that she held. By virtue of several works on local history and freedom struggle in India, she established her reputation as an authoritative historian.

The author has acknowledged her debt of gratitude to her father, a God-fearing man of unfailing courtesy and goodwill who gave her moral support all his life. Her father, a civil servant, who held important administrative positions, enjoyed the trust of his superior British officials, and was equally adapt in adjusting himself to the changing conditions when India became independent. Prabha Chopra emphasises the fall in the value system of governance in the post-independent period when corruption and favourtism gained ascendancy and objectivity was bidden adieu.

The author narrates incidents of unseemly behaviour on the part of some of the superior officials but she shows exemplary courage in maintaining her integrity and dignity by clinging to her stubborn faith in God. Of course there were brilliant officials like Aditya Nath Jha who set a unique example by treating their subordinates generously and giving them their due on the basis of sheer merit.

Chopra throws light on the circumstances that led to her marriage with Dr P.N. Chopra, who has made a definite contribution to historical knowledge. Then began an intellectual companionship resulting in several important historical works on a variety of themes. The husband is officious, formal and meticulous, but the wife is gracious and ever smiling!

Late marriages in a joint Hindu family has its perils which tend to curb initiative and independence due to lack of cooperative spirit of give-and-take, a rare feature to find in the sphere of social behaviour. The suffocating atmosphere of a joint family order left no alterative for the couple but to move on to Bapanagar residence to breathe the free air of relief in congenial surroundings suitable for further creative work.

The book also gives a synoptic view of the visits to foreign countries, the USA, U.K. and Japan in an academic persuit. As a lover of dogs, the author has given a moving account of her pet dog Benjo, his life and death. I think that animal love like gardening is perhaps the finest and most unselfish of human activity.

Inventing the Nation:
India and Pakistan, by Ian Talbot. Arnold, London. Pages 312.
£ 19.99.

REFUSING to take the "nation" as a "given" entity a new series explores the extent to which nations are made not born, whether through conscious manipulation by an elite, guided by more "popular" imperatives or a combination of the two. The idea is to revisit the history of particular countries, including Russia, China, France and the USA, with new concepts of globalisation or circumventing the influence of nationalism by creating international or supranational structures or agencies. Interestingly enough, the first title in the series takes up the case of India and Pakistan tackling, as the general editor (Keith Robbins) points out, a history of "particular complexity" where these issues are concerned. Especially in that the fallout from a failure to resolve or at least accommodate conflicts "could now be nuclear".

In a brief introductory chapter, the author offers a broad survey of developments in the recent past posing some oft-asked questions, which offer "no simple answer". In the light of Gen Pervez Musharraf’s coup, is Pakistan "governable" only by the army? And in view of the NDA’s alleged attempt at saffronisation, is the BJP capable of "reinventing" India in its own image? The study posits the view that while some would accept the idea of India being invented around the 1880s being reinvented afresh by the Hindutva movement, others regard it as a natural "given" which can be traced to a golden Vedic age in antiquity.

In much the same way, Pakistan can be variously regarded as a "modern invention" or as the "natural outcome" of two separate Hindu and Muslim nations inhabiting the subcontinent from the time of the Arab conquest of Sind in 712 AD.

Some definitions are called for in this debate on semantics. Primordialists see the nation as a "natural order"; modernists, "a recent construct" arising from the socio-economic transformation of the past 200 odd years. In the preceding quarter century or so, modernisation’s "meta-narrative" has been increasingly "deconstructed" by post-modernists who underline the importance of multiculturalism and fragmentation which go beyond the nation state and offer both a new identity in politics and a globalised culture.

In concrete terms, in India while Nehru blended a perennialist and voluntarist understanding, his actions as Prime Minister epitomised the modernist, "constructed" understanding of the nation. This does not hold good for Pakistan which was "invented" both as a term and a nation carved out of united India. Yet that "invention" carried power because it drew on the deep-seated cultural values and anxieties of the North Indian Muslim community.

Talbot’s own approach sounds reasonably sensible. He leans towards ethno-symbolism, which acknowledges nationalism as an ideology arising from the challenges of modernisation, but also recognises that it builds on pre-existing shared identities. In other words, modern nationalists have not "invented" but rather rediscovered and reinterpreted the symbols, myths and popular memories of their pre-modern identities. In sum, the importance of history’s role in forging modern national and communal attachments needs no emphasis. And nearer home, Indian nationalism emerged as a blend of tradition and modernity.

The study surveys a vast canvas starting with Indian notions of community and authority and the impact upon them of western technology and "orientalist" understandings. The responses to the colonial impact formed the basis for the "construction" of communal and ethnic as well as national identities. In succeeding chapters, the book explores the articulation of community and national identities to wider sections of society and underscores the impact of the press, fiction, rituals and festivals with their strong appeal at the popular level. At the same time socio-religious movements among the Hindus, Muslims and Sikh communities institutionalised the new ideas.

In due course came the politicisation of community identities. Here the important role played by the Ilbert Bill (1883) is heavily underscored for it barely concealed racism beneath the surface of the Raj. And demonstrated to the Indian professional classes that united action alone could win concessions. At about the same time Muslim separatism raised its head being rooted both in the North Indian Muslims’ response to the loss of political power as well as to Hindu resurgence. In the event, the formation of the Indian National Congress (1885) and the All-India Muslim League (1906) were only natural corollaries.

In sum, between the 1880s and the early 1920s, communal and regional identities were politicised. Oddly though, this aspect has been neglected in mainstream histories which have taken their cue largely from the nationalist discourse.

The provincialisation of politics by the Raj in the decades between the two world wars under the system of dyarchy boosted the regionally based parties. The Congress mounted mass nationalist campaigns during this period but these were largely episodic. For day-to-day politics continued to be dominated by the patronage of concessions of provincial politicians. It was only when British departure became imminent that the spotlight shifted to all-India issues, to the immense advantage of the mainstream nationalist parties.

Talbot views the emergence of independent India and Pakistan as a triumph of nationalism over ethnic and communal identities to be a misreading of history. For secular territorial nationalism not only jostled with competing identities at the time of British departure but also made significant compromises with communal and parochial loyalties. The division of the subcontinent also represented a defeat for the Indian secular nationalist vision by acknowledging "communal" demand of the Pakistan movement, Hindu nationalists viewed Nehru’s acceptance of the June 3 plan as nothing less than a betrayal. Again, communalism in both India and Pakistan drew strength from the massive social disruptions which accompanied the British withdrawal.

In the final count, independence could not and did not — despite rhetoric to the countary — signify the trumph of the nationalist project. But rather, as Ambedkar was to put it, an attempt to become a nation in the making."

Some of the major contours of the prevailing situation are easy to discern. In India, the pressures of globalisation and Hindu nationalism have transformed some of the key institutions and ideas in the building process. The dominance of the Congress and of the Planning Commission have well-nigh disappeared but their legacies in the shape of a professional army, an apolitical bureaucracy and an independent Election Commission have eased India’s development in comparison with its neighbour.

In Pakistan, by contrast, the prominence of the bureaucracy and the army has perpetuated a viceregal tradition privileging administration and order over the encouragement of political participation.Periodic bouts of martial law, while temporarily keeping the lid on dissidence have in the long run exacerbated resistance to what looks like a remote and colonial-like state. The association of the military and to a lesser extent the bureaucracy with Punjab has, especially in the post-1971 era, raised charges of Panjabisation of Pakistan.

In the event, civil society remains fragile in relation to the state’s coercive capacity. Institutional life is weak and under-developed.While the role of Islam in the state and the relationship between Pakistan and more "primordial" identities still wait to be resolved.

Talbot draws interesting parallels between elite assertion of communal and ethnic identity in the late 19th century colonial India arising from a situation of socio-economic instability and the print explosion and ethnic and religious reassertion at the mass level in a contemporary subcontinent undergoing the impact of globalisation. He cites with approval Sunil Khilnani’s compelling symbolism of Bombay and Bangalore; the one stalled by de industrialisation and the accompanying rise of the Shiv Sena, the other experiencing the rapid growth of its Silicon Valley boon of the multinationals

A significant point the book makes pertains to the "previously overdrawn" distinction between "authoritarian" Pakistan and "democratic" India. Both countries, it avers, have displayed "no mercy" towards secessionist movements even when repression has been counter-productive.Again, both have increased their coercive capacity while at the same time losing their ability to accommodate pluralism. It underlines the grim reality that the two states’ panoply of legal powers and deployment of armed force against dissent "far exceeds" anything that the Raj possessed. and this increasing coercive power appears likely to compensate for the state’s "declining legitimacy".

The ideas inspiring Indian nationalism and Muslim separatism could be articulated to a wider audience than ever before because of the communication revolution brought about by the colonial state. Independence changed the rules of the game in enabling the nationalist elites to control the machinery of the state. In the event, among other things, history is in the process of being rewritten. Thus the Islamising regime of Zia-ul-Haq ignored the ambivalence of many of the ulema and moved them to the forefront and "implausibly" portrayed Jinnah as seeking to establish an Islamic state. Similarly the BJP-RSS combine has made serious attempts to "saffronise" historical writing and research. Talbot reveals that the leading scholar G.N. Barrier has gone so far as to see the partisan traffic in ideas about identity emanating from some 1,500 Sikh websites at the beginning of 1999 replicating in many ways the earlier tract warfare of the Singh Sabha era.

The study ends on a somewhat somber note putting forth the view that the pseudo-traditional but in reality equally modernist imagings of the nation by Islamists and followers of the Hindutva philosophy afford a bleak future of "mean-spirited and socially and economically divisive" governance. And cites with approval an Indian social scientist, the late T.V. Sathyamurthy’s prognosis about the two nations in which the polity is split: the relatively economically privileged nation above in which there is intra-elite conflict for resources in the name of caste, religion and region. And the nation below through which runs a common denominator of dispossession, disinheritance, poverty and marginalisation. One hates to think that the growing economic, social and ecological struggles of the nation below — minorities, women, haris and dalits —ultimately, not unlike a prairie fire spread a new pro-people sense of identity. And overwhelm the existing elite styles.

Two brief criticisms may be in order. One, the divide between the rich and the poor — the privileged and the unprivileged (or the underprivileged) — is neither new nor yet special to the subcontinent. In the 1830s, not to go farther back, Benjamin Disraeli made his political debut by writing a well-argued treatise on the "Two Nations" in which his land was then sharply split. And one is less than sure that in Tony Blair’s England today the gap has been so bridged or narrowed as to be nonexistent.

Again, rewriting history for narrow, parochial ends bears no special subcontinental imprint. It comes handy to all ruling elites so unsure of themselves as to face uncomfortable facts. Japan’s stern refusal to revise its school texts to incorporate the honest truth about its less than honourable record in China or Korea in the first half of the 20th century reveals a brave effort at smudging, on perpetuating a falsehood.

Professor of South Asian Studies at the Coventry University in England, Ian Talbot has written extensively on India and Pakistan. Among his better-known works mention may be made of "Provincial Politics and the Pakistan Movement" (1988), "Khizr Tiwana, the Punjab Unionist Party" and the "Partition of India" (1996) and "Pakistan A Modern History" (1999).

Story of Internet and www
Review by Chandra Mohan

Where Wizards stay up Late - the Origins of the Net by Katie Hafner & Matthew Iyon. Simon & Schuster, New York. Pages 304.

Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future by Tim Berners. Lee Texere. Pages 272.

INTERNET and World Wide Web are the twin innovations which are today revolutionising human life at bewildering speed across the globe. By sheer coincidence, I happened to land books on these two inter-linked revolutions together. Since looking at them together would give a better perspective, a joint review. Incidentally, out of the two, while the "World Wide Web" has an inventor, Net cannot single out the name of any particular father. Net is a three decade evolution in which at least a dozen fathers laid key bricks.

The foundations of Net were laid by Licklider’s thoughts in a 1962 MIT paper on the information handling possibilities of time-sharing of computers, coupled main-computer systems and the role this could play in human life. It must be remembered that the paper came at a time when the world of computers and communications was primitive. Computers were huge room-size electron-tube machines with just a few kilobytes of memory; each make was unique and inter-communication between makes impossible; punched tape programming just coming in; tortoise slow. Interest in computers was also low; only a handful of universities ran courses.

Ruina, director of the young Advanced Research Programme Agency of US Defence, picked up Licklider’s revolutionary thoughts and then hired him to take it forward. The ARPA programme on information processing techniques office was taken forward boldly by Taylor and Ruina’s successor, Herzfeld and then most boldly, the development contract for a four university-node prototype awarded to a small company of enthusiastic top R&D scientists, Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). Such preference against computer biggies like IBM, Rand and Honeywell was indeed bold. A highly relevant coincident parallel invention was Baran’s communication networks and packet-switching of data for improved computer utilisation.

ARPA itself had an interesting birth. President Eisenhower was no stranger to the eternal inter-service wrangle for R&D funds for promotion of pet projects, irrespective of value. Anti-communist post-war hysteria had only fuelled the appetite of Generals and their contractor friends. With direct knowledge of scientist contribution to Allied victory, he created ARPA led by hand-picked scientific brains, as an unbiased balance.

Net’s urgency was driven by the necessity of an infallible and fast communication network in the emergency of a crippling nuclear first-strike by the Soviets. The fear psychosis was further heightened by successful launch of Sputnik in the mid-sixties. With this new space capability, conventional fixed-copper-line telephone hub-and-spoke connections could be bashed up in a split-second and the entire nuclear network incapacitated. Giant AT&T, impervious to customer need, only advocated addition of redundant hardwire networks.

The Net seed was sown in such a milieu. With very few scientists interested in computers, the task was not easy. Fortunately, Director Roberts of ARPA was persuasive enough to hand-pick top scientific minds from MIT’s Lincoln Lab into a $ 1 million project contract to BBN for a trans-continental four-node network between different computer makes between MIT, SRI, University of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and University of Utah. He also managed to persuade AT&T to lay special high-speed 50kb links. In this network, a single computer performed the entire information management protocol (IMP) task: Routing message packets to different destinations as well as break-up/re-assembly of packets for the local sub-network. First success between two nodes came in October, 1969; the two computer makes were different.

The first link via radio came in 1970 to the University of Hawaii. The intercontinental link up to parallel UK link come up under British Telecom patronage, Satlink, came through satellite and France also got linked. It was for the Satlink that Cerf and Kahn came out with the brilliant solution to separating the routing and message-packeting tasks and handling them on two computers. The now universal TCT/IP pair of codes is an offshoot of this separation. Ethernet contribution for local networks came from Metcalfe and Lamson at Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Centre.

Since some defence labs were a part of Arpanet, for security of defence information it was decided to break it up in the mid-seventies. In the meantime with the transformation of the computing world, clamour for computer courses had mounted. The new mantle was taken over by National Science Foundation and separate networks like edu, com, org, etc. took birth. Some of them were commercial. E-mail traffic on the net was sky-rocketing. Net had taken off.

E-mail came in 1973; simplified by Tomlinson’s @ symbol in 1973; and; the standard message-addressing style adopted in 1977. One by one, different groups saw the infinite possibilities in instant sharing of information between doctors, research scholars, business.... Even Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign used it.

But the universal explosion of Net came out of two other innovations. The first was Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the http protocol when he was working at CERN, the international super-particle smasher in Geneva and creation of the World Wide Web, the html and www. It brought navigation and information sharing to the masses.

The super-collider at CERN was a cooperative global enterprise open to the topmost scientists of the world for their own research programmes. Since thousands of scientists would come for a year or two to conduct their own experiments and go away, it had no collected wisdom of its own to share. With no shared information and a vast setup, duplication of effort was also common. It was this need which led to the creation of the Web by a young British researcher at CERN, Berners-Lee. Web was thrown open to public domain by CERN in 1994 and its recognition as an instrument of radical social change came soon after. It had become a global juggernaut by 1995.

Industry was naturally keen to establish IPO rights in footholds in its immense commercial opportunities and IPO wars were natural, particularly in commercial-minded USA. Lee went on to head a new voluntary consortium at MIT for maintaining its open character, standards, dispute-arbitration and guiding it into future issues like collated information access, security and privacy.

The second was the Marc Andreesen’s invention of Mosaic software for the point to the icon and click browser which led to the creation of Netscape by its inventor.

The juggernaut continues to get bigger by the second.

Catching up with western sensibilities
Review by Shalini Kalia

Used Book by Makarand Paranjape.
Indialog Publications, New Delhi. Pages 119.

"WHO is John Galt?" The question haunts first-time readers of Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged". A host of such questions bother the reader of the "Used Book", why, for example, does this greatest persuader of nativist poetry write in a foreign idiom, filling page upon page of drab rehashes of India through a westerner’s eyes? The saving grace is a handful of poems scattered in between, which, however, like the last rays of the dying sun, fail to add to the brilliance of the volume.

The prologue is more of a patronising note by the unpublished self of the poet. He seems to be amused by his published persona’s accomplishment. On some reflection, his initial envy gives way to grudging respect, even sparking off a tiny current of inspiration.

"Hosts of them camp in my head". The first poem in the volume titled, "Food for thought", compares words with locusts. The poet knows that when this flood of word-ideas recedes, "We’ll heap all the dead words/and cook them. It is said/they are delicious with rice and lentils."

Most of the ideation process, however, stops there. From then on, the poet goes through the monotony of expostulating on the poverty around us — in economic as well as emotional terms — with few fresh insights. So much for the poet’s advocacy of the concept of "nativism", which he states, "is a form of indigenism whose agenda can be summed up as a cry for cultural self-respect and autonomy emanating from the bahujan samaj — the majority of ordinary people who make up the plurality of Indian civilisation."

Quite justly, John Oliver Perry ("Encountering in Indian Criticism: A Personal and Collective Appeal, Indian Literature", Nov-Dec, 99) while alluding to the contrast between the theory that the poet proposes and his practice, points out, "…their (the critic’s) individuality is … assertively expressed, their egos preserved, while the ideal of a community of criticism — independent, nationalistic, international or otherwise — is cynically abandoned…"

The same could be safely assumed for the poet’s excursions on the road much travelled, abandoning the many theories he proposed along the way.

The women, for example, in his poems are "dark and handsome", "the Mother Indias" — "the perpetual givers", who brave starvation, feed their brood and trudge the beaten path, never once complaining of the heavy cross they bear — imagery, which lays on in thick, no uncertain terms, that the Weltenschaaung about India has once again been sucked dry. Even the modesty of the Indian woman has to be illustrated by the discreet way in which she hides her under garments while putting them out to dry. "During the monsoon, the pus of the city/oozes, and women, with babies at their breasts/wade across filthy gutters…"

The imagery turns more Hamletesque as the volume progresses, the only respite being the poet’s confessions of his own opulence. After that, he reaches a dead end. He knows he cannot walk away like Siddhartha and opt for the "path of poverty" and, in a last ditch effort, tries to dignify the poor, with little success. "Each vacation, we measured our years/by the progress of the new tar road."

It is lines like these, carrying faint echoes of Ramanujan’s volume, "Relations" ("a house that leaned/slowly through our growing/years on a bent coconut/tree in the yard." ‘Obituary’)that the mud smells of the first showers. His character sketches are vastly more appealing, like that of Maganbhai, a victim of the eternal dichotomy, the poverty he was born in and the richness surrounding him, who refuses to reconcile with his fate and has to pay the price with his life instead. He has his death "deconstructed" by the very class he aspired to belong to, in their plush drawing rooms over a peg or two, neatly absolving themselves of the murder. The Narayanesque "Nanaji Rao" recreates a man forgotten in the mists of time. "The smallest thing upsets me so much…"

Very much in the league of the different personae of the poet, who claim to be little understood by those around, the lady in "Neurotica", suffers from the modern malady of having too much time on her hands but with no one to pay attention to her, carrying shades of the "Shakespearian rag" from Eliot’s "Wasteland".

The "Roach trap" stands a little apart from the rest because of the multi-layered texture of the poem, with the roaches falling into the sticky trap compared to the culmination of the diasporic dream in adhesive layers of material comfort earned abroad.

The poems have a liberal sprinkling of wit, for example in "Undies", where the woman hangs her husband’s underwear with "the clip squarely grabbing the crotch" or when the poet talks of slipping on the first snow "the ice casually introduces itself" as well as in phrases like "cotton rain". Time and again, he goes back to Eliot when the flushing of ants is mentioned as "death by water" and occasionally evokes poets like Jayanta Mahapatra when his "Miss Gobble" reverberates Mahapatra’s "Hunger" — the common strand between both being carnal pleasures that can be so cheaply bought.

The volume, however, is not much to write home about. One wonders at the poetry written through a western, urban, elite male’s eyes, which poses the same old dilemmas of today’s civilisation. And unlike Ayn Rand’s mammoth novel, offers very few solutions.

For more than 40 years, Ryszard Kapuscinski has been unravelling the complexities of Africa for Western readers. And his simple tip for surviving war and disaster? Don’t eat anything cut with a knife, writes Tim Adams

HIS study looks very much like home - every surface carefully piled with books, files, photos and manuscripts - but it is not where Ryszard Kapuscinski really lives. The attic room in his reconstructed prewar house in central Warsaw is the place he comes back to, every now and again, to reflect on an extraordinary journey just ended and to plan the one about to begin. Over the past five decades, these quests have taken him to every forgotten extremity on earth. He has returned here to recuperate, or to escape the firing line, or simply to get out of the sun. Pinned onto the beams of the attic are a lifetime of poems, quotes and aphorisms, scraps of itinerant wisdom. Among them is a headline ripped from a newspaper: `World is very big trouble.’ For Kapuscinski, much of this big trouble - most of the 27 revolutions he’s witnessed first hand - has occurred in Africa, where for the Sixties and Seventies he was Poland’s only foreign correspondent. Africa is the leading character of Kapuscinski’s most extraordinary work, including The Emperor, one of the past century’s handful of indelible books, an account of the imperial court of Haile Selassie, part comedy of manners, part anatomy of a tragic megalomania, and The Shah of Shahs, his surrealist account of the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty and the fundamentalist revolution in Iran.

It is the place, too, where he had his youth and where he came of age. His new volume, The Shadow of the Sun, is perhaps the closest this most essential of the world’s writers, now nearly 70, will come to an autobiography. And, appropriately, it is also a memoir of a continent, told as a series of remarkable episodic adventures.

When he first arrived in Accra in 1958, Kapuscinski was perhaps uniquely qualified to tell the story of that ‘other planet’. As a boy, he first smelt Africa in Mr Kanzman’s little shop, Colonial and Other Goods, purveyor of almonds, cloves and cocoa, in his home town of Pinsk, now part of Belarus, what he describes to me as ‘the poorest, most afflicted, most miserable part of Europe’. To illustrate his point, he gets a book down from one of his steepling shelves, a collection of misty documentary photographs of the lost world of his childhood - thatched huts, carts drawn by oxen, floating markets, marshy jungle; no gaslight, no electricity, no roads. ‘So it was always like being in the villages of the Congo,’ he says, smiling a little. Kapuscinski was the son of the local schoolteacher and his dreams were African dreams, too, of shoes and of food.

In 1939, Kapuscinski’s father was taken prisoner of war by the Russians, but he escaped from the camp before he was deported to Siberia. The family smuggled themselves across the shifting Polish border in a horsedrawn cart and fetched up on the blasted outskirts of Warsaw. During the Nazi occupation, his father continued to try to teach, while working for the underground. After the war, again under Soviet rule, at a secondary school with no windows and bombed-out walls, there was only one book which the boys in Kapuscinski’s class would pass around to learn to read, a copy of Stalin’s The Problems of Leninism.

Kapuscinski wrote poems, had a young man’s ambition to see the world, but his imagination, at that time, stretched no further than neighbouring Czechoslovakia. The day he left school, because he could write, and because a whole generation of Polish intelligentsia had been killed or deported, Kapuscinski was hired by a Warsaw newspaper. In the years that followed, he made a name with investigative reports critical of the ‘advances’ made by the Soviet regime, and eventually his editor decided to send him abroad, partly because he had a grasp of English, partly, you guess - ironically - to keep him out of harm’s way.

He went first to India aged 24. ‘I felt overwhelmed by it,’ he says remembering, eyes shining. ‘But when I arrived, I did not understand even when people were talking to me in English. And I started to cry, did not know what I would do, how I would work. I was walking down the street and there was a man selling books on the street, and I bought two: an old Penguin edition of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and a small dictionary. And I went to my old hotel in Old Delhi and I opened the novel and I opened the dictionary and I started to go through it word by word, and slowly I learnt.’ Presumably, I suggest, there was a great sense of liberation just to get out of Warsaw.

‘Yes, of course, but I was not thinking of that. I was thinking all the time of the enormous task in front of me. You have to understand I had no idea at all of the world, no history, no sense of culture. And I realised I have to learn and learn and learn. And I am still continuing with this. The world is so big and it is so difficult to describe it.’ Kapuscinski made it his business to travel more in hope than expectation; his stories often begin with sentences like this one: ‘I arrived in Kumasi with no particular goal.’ He kept his mind open to chance - his face is animated by the possibilities of life - and where he could, he kept away from the pack of other journalists: ‘I always thought,’ he says, ‘that if you go on assignment you should always go alone. If you go even with one other person, that person influences your perception of what is out there. It is better, necessary, to face these other realities alone, and to see how you respond to them without any interference and be responsible to that.’ When Africans looked at him, he knew exactly what they saw: ‘The white man, the one who took everything from me, who beat my grandfather on his back, who raped my mother... slavery, colonialism, 500 years of injustice...’ But Kapuscinski refused to be guilty for the sins of other men’s fathers. Instead, he told villagers that he, too, as a Pole, was the victim of terrible colonial oppression, had known what it was like to live in constant hunger, but when he did so they smiled incredulously and walked away. Still, he refused to let it rest. And to prove his point, his humanity, he went to live among the people he wrote about - in a lean-to room in the desperate shanty towns of Lagos, sharing a handful of rice with the starving subsistence farmers of the Sahel - and tried to tell the stories of their emerging countries as they might have told them.

He arrived at a propitious moment. Kapuscinski’s Africa began in 1958 in Ghana and in hope, listening to the revolutionary words of Kwame Nkrumah, the first in a long line of independence leaders whose careers he saw begin in electric optimism and often end in infamy or despair or violent death. In one year alone, 1960, 17 African countries ceased being colonies, and Kapuscinski was there to record it all. ‘

But at the same time, I was very busy,’ he says. ‘I knew that what I was doing was very superficial. The way in which Africa was often reported: ‘’President of Togo went to visit President of the Ivory Coast’’. It’s totally meaningless, and even as I was doing that, I knew it.’ So as well as sending news of 50 countries back home on the wires, Kapuscinski began compiling another kind of intimate account of Africa in his head.

‘Each of my books,’ he says, ‘I see as a second volume. The first volume of events was news items. But the books I did for myself. To try to understand these things for myself.’ Into them he poured everything he knew. ‘I was very interested in anthropology and oral history and I was reading everything, fiction, travel, history, science, poetry and trying to use all that I was reading.’ In this way, over the years, Kapuscinski has created his own kind of reporting and he has come up with many ways of describing it. Sometimes he resorts to the Latin phrase silva rerum - ‘the forest of things’; at other times, he calls it ‘literature by foot’; whatever it is, it is much more than journalism, more an old-fashioned storytelling given a modernist edge of dislocation and irony.

‘I witnessed in effect history in the making, real history, our history,’ he says. ‘But I was also surprised. I never saw another writer in Africa. I never met a poet or a philosopher or even a sociologist... then I would return to Europe and I would find them, writers writing their little domestic stories: the boy, the girl, the marriage, the divorce.’ Back home in Poland, his accounts of the vanity and corruptibility of power, and the comic, terrifying structures of dictatorship were read as dissident parables of the mutability of the Soviet-backed regime. Such parallels were accidental, Kapuscinski says, his eyes quick with mischief, but still impossible to ignore. He became involved in establishing the Solidarity movement at home in the early Eighties, but his real political work was done thousands of miles away, often at great personal risk.

Where I wonder, does he think his restless sense of vocation came from? Kapuscinski passes his hands over his face, shakes his head a little, as if at the troubles he’s seen. ‘I don’t know where it came from: my father? My childhood? Or simply from seeing these people who have nothing to expect from life. But mostly I think I understood that to know anything at all about these cultures - in Rwanda, say, or Ethiopia - and to have the gift of describing them - you have to have a bit of the zeal, the humility, the craziness of the missionary. If you are staying in the Hilton or Sheraton you will never know, you will never write these things.’ As a result of this zeal, Kapuscinski has suffered over the years, as he says, ‘all types of tropical disease except Aids’. In the current book, he recounts the story of contracting cerebral malaria in the bush in Uganda, later complicated by TB. (When he awoke after one bout of hallucinatory sweating, the first face he saw staring at him was that of Idi Amin, on a hospital visit.) ‘My tropical experience tells me only one thing,’ he says. ‘Do not eat anything that has been cut with a knife. The edge of a knife carries all the bacteria. Bananas OK; oranges OK.’ Other than that, he trusts to luck.

Were there times when he thought why am I here? Is it worth it? ‘Yes and no. I always went of my own free will and for my own curiosity. But sometimes in a war situation you can get in but you can’t get out. Then you wonder. But that is the life, that is the choice. I know no other life and I love this life.’ Paradoxically, he says, the worst situations were never ‘shooting situations’, when he has been on the front line of guerrilla conflicts. The real fear occurs ‘when you are sick and dying and it is hot and hopeless and there is no hope of getting to a hospital. Often you are in places where if something happens to you, no one will ever know. And you are surrounded by people who have no thoughts of self-preservation, let alone any thoughts for you. How do you appeal to these desperate people for help or assistance? The question of life and death in our culture is very important. But there are places that those questions are not so important.These are not good places to get sick. I never met a man who is not afraid in such a place.’ Has it been possible to construct any kind of normal life at home over these years? ‘No. Home is where my books are.’ But it is also where his wife, and his daughter, now 48, are. Did they never say: ‘Enough’?

‘Never,’ he says, gratefully. ‘My wife has always known how important this is to me. And that this is a life that you cannot plan. I have been to places where in the whole country there is one plane and that plane may be broken. So your life becomes a matter of accident, a terrible waste of time. And in the time you are waiting for this lorry or that bus - days, weeks - all you can do is become like a stone. You have to completely disconnect. You have to learn not to worry, not to be anxious. And there are not many people prepared to do this, to waste all this time.’ He looks around his room, at the lost time contained in the typescript for his next book, about life among the Indians of the Andes, stacked on his writing table; the ‘wasted’ years in Africa represented by countless notebooks and fragmentary mementos, a Masai woman’s decorative leather bra, an ancient rum bottle found in the Niger Delta, once the price of a slave. And then he looks back at me. ‘But I believe, too, perhaps that this is the way you get to the truth of this world.

The Noonday Demon:
An Anatomy of Depression, by Andrew Solomon (published in the UK by Chatto & Windus).

‘DEPRESSION is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair," says Andrew Solomon at the start of his magnificent book.In his first sweeping sentences, he gathers up the themes and even the words that will resonate through the following pages of linked autobiography, history, science, analysis, wrenched and luminous meditation on life and pain.

Love, loss and despair ring out their melancholy notes. In depression, he says over and over again, life loses its meaning; the ‘only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance".Yet The Noonday Demon stands as a testament to all those qualities that are lost during times of deathly meaninglessness: it describes numbness with vitality, wretchedness with poetry, lovelessness with passion, fear with exuberance, slack-jawed horror with wit and tenderness, deadly silence with this fervent outpouring of words.Depression is a country that the undepressed can"t enter, but Solomon, who has travelled there and knows it well, bends all his energy and talent as a writer to sending us snapshots from this terrifying land (mood, he writes, ‘is a frontier like deep ocean or deep space"). The result is scary but far from dispiriting; at times, Solomon"s voice, calling to us from beyond the frontier, achieves a lonely rapture.Solomon writes that depression can only be evoked by metaphors (the abyss, the edge, the darkness). The first that he uses himself is of a tree wrapped around by a vine; at some point, the vine squeezes the life out of the tree. Then he talks of angels and demons: grief is like a humble angel that leaves us with a clear sense of our own depth; depression is the (noonday) demon that leaves you appalled.Mild depression is gradual, like rust; it is too much grief at too slight a cause.

Major depression is the stuff of breakdowns, not rust, but the startling collapse of the whole system. He has been gripped by major depression himself, when he was ‘asphyxiated", ‘split and racked", and ‘every second of being alive hurt". There was not even enough life left for tears, just ‘the arid pain of total violation". As you fall towards this living death, he says, the first thing that goes from you is happiness. The next is the sadness that led you here. Then your sense of humour, the belief in and capacity for love. You smell sour to your self, and thinned. Your face comes apart in the mirror. You have no ability to trust, to touch, to grieve: ‘Eventually, you are simply absence."There were many days when he couldn"t move, couldn"t swing his legs out of bed, couldn"t control his bodily functions; he could only lie in a corner and weep. He wanted to die but didn"t have the energy to kill himself. He did, however, pick up gay men whom he thought might be HIV positive and have sex with them, in the hope he, too, would become infected. Solomon is well aware of the ‘preposterousness" of his depression and the uselessness of tracking its causes.He is a wealthy, white American, a privileged, healthy, admired writer, envied by many for his success, his wealth, his luck, his apparent gaiety and ease. He has many friends. He was reasonably happy as a child, although confused about his sexuality and sometimes gripped by panic. His first major breakdown occurred after the death of his beloved mother (an assisted suicide because of her terminal cancer. He, his father and brother sat by her bed and held her hands and wept while she swallowed handfuls of pills and told them how dearly she loved them) and the publication of his first novel.But nothing ‘explains" how three times he came to be laid so low, and how now he takes pills and sees a therapist to keep the demon at bay. He offers a set of simple instructions to other sufferers (listen to people who love you, seek out memories, block out terrible thoughts as they approach, be brave, exercise, eat). His book, he insists, was not cathartic, but a way of reaching out to others in their isolation, a way of explaining them to us. At its heart, it is deeply idealistic in its intent:

‘Words are strong and love is the other way forwards."Solomon"s experience of depression, which comes like a gale force wind and departs quietly, forms only part of The Noonday Demon, though it is the emotional undertow through the whole of it. He portrays the pain of others, in different cultures and histories, showing that far from being a disease of the wealthy and the leisured classes and of modernity, it has always been with us under different names. Hippocrates wrote about it, as did Homer, Galen, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Keats, Virginia Woolf and Freud.The poor feel it (but, although depression cuts across all the classes, treatment of it does not), as do the the war-torn. He goes to Cambodia (where he was ‘humbled down to the ground" by the courage of the people he met) and meets people who have lived through war and loss such as he can hardly imagine. One woman teaches him that the way through the darkness is by ‘forgetting, working, loving". He goes to Greenland, where up to 80 per cent of the population are depressed and the suicide rate is 0.35 per cent per year. He visits elderly people in homes; he goes to hospitals and slums.He looks at the medical and alternative cures - anti-depressants, anxiety controllers, St John"s Wort, exercise, work, food, massage, homoeopathy. He tries out different therapies (psychoanalysis, he says, is good at expressing depression, not good at changing it - it"s like firing a machine gun at an incoming tide). He goes to talk groups. He gathers stories from all over the country, from sufferers and doctors, from people who have cut their flesh to ribbons and drunk themselves into stupors, from people who have been terribly abused, from people who have come out the other side.

More young people die of depression than of Aids, heart disease, pneumonia, cancer and strokes put together. One in 10 people in America is on drugs to help their moods. Five per cent of its teenagers are clinically depressed. Fifteen per cent of people who are depressed eventually kill themselves.Some people kill themselves, Solomon says, to simplify things. He remembers thinking that he himself didn"t have the energy to wash the dishes or take a shower, so he might as well go and die rather than face the mundane tasks that make up a day, a life. But while ‘living death is not pretty, unlike dead death, it offers the hope for amelioration".Solomon is inclusive in his theories as well as his stories. There has long been a discussion about whether depression is an illness or an extreme version of ordinary sadness, whether it reveals or assaults a personality. Both, he says. What are the boundaries of identity, what do we mean by ‘self"?

If depression is ‘just" chemical, so, too, is love. Medicine might release a sufferer from the trap, but it does not reinvent him or her. Depression springs like a beast from outside, yet is wired in the brain and runs through the veins.’The real me lives in the world; the self exists in the narrow space where the world and our choices come together." The depression he experiences is part of the man that he is.What Solomon unequivocally and with a raw, sometimes disturbing, romanticism, believes in is the authenticity, even the gift, of his endured pain. To be happy all the time is a spooky, even terrifying idea or a form of idiocy. He quotes a Russian expression: if you wake up feeling no pain, you"re dead. He quotes Ovid: ‘Welcome this pain." He believes his own grief and darkness have shown him the ‘acreage and reach" of his soul. He writes that ‘the individuality of each person"s struggle is unbreachable" and that depression, ‘like sex, retains an unquenchable aura of mystery. It is new every time".It is ‘fire in the blood"; it nearly kills him but it produces from him words and poetry that he would not otherwise have uttered, and teaches him a better way of living and loving.By the end of the book"s long journey, he claims that he has learnt to love his depression as a way of learning to love himself. He knows it is lurking inside him still, and will one day probably ambush him again, but he closes with ardent, melancholy optimism: ‘Each day I choose to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?"

Repression: Key to happiness?
Review by Charlotte Mendelson

The Pursuit of Happiness
by Douglas Kennedy (published in the UK by Hutchinson).

REPRESSION is a wonderful thing. It may even be the key to happiness.For while the rest of us wallow in the turbid waters of self-analysis, regret and doubt, the truly repressed scud by on an armoured craft of certainty: wise and faintly smug. Douglas Kennedy’s Manhattan epic, The Pursuit of Happiness, has two narrators. The younger, Kate, is a modern woman who responds to heartbreak the modern way (whisky and sobbing). The elder, Sara, is not.Matter-of-factness personified, Sara maintains WASPish (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) sang-froid even in the face of gore and torment. She may be the ideal companion in an air raid.Her suitability for a tale of death, passion and financial windfalls is another matter.

Mysterious Sara first appears, an elegant Banquo, at the funeral of Kate’s mother. She has a secret connection with Kate, and reveals it by giving her a manuscript: the central 400 pages of this novel.It is a story of the Forties and Fifties, of highballs and Remingtons, McCarthyism, civil obedience, and adultery, in this case with Jack, Kate’s father, the tangled love of Sara’s life. Like life, The Pursuit of Happiness is wildly unpredictable. This is its greatest strength. Kennedy is an agile storyteller who excels at surprises, and his characters have varied and exciting lives. It has all the ingredients of an outstanding page-turner - yet, it seems, Kennedy has other plans, and the result is less gripping, less moving and, frustratingly, less worthy of him than it might have been. Sara appears, with lengthy period scene-setting, at a point where our sympathy lies with Kate. Kate barely knew her father, and so sensible Sara’s wartime romance with him is an unwelcome distraction. Unfortunately, for the next 200 pages, this is how Sara remains.

She is not a sympathetic heroine. Her first ever story rivals Faulkner and Hemingway, her journalism is legendary, and she’s the `fastest wit in the West’. However, like her comedian brother, she is not actually funny. She is also fantastically repressed. She has lived, beneath the tweed, a racy life, but she is of her time, and `back then, everyone did their best to avoid frank discussions about anything that was potentially painful’. This is not, thank God, the Fifties, and as jealousy and loss did exist we want to know how their participants felt, whether or not they acknowledged these feelings. However, despite her protestations of emotion, Sara’s responses remain relentlessly prosaic. Even at its most dramatic, the novel is weirdly subdued by Kennedy’s narrative technique. He favours wide-angled shots at moments of crisis, when Shaker-style dressers are more annoyance than helpful detail. Both Kate and Sara talk us through every mundane action, always making time to tip cab-drivers liberally before rushing off.

Voiceover-style echoey flashbacks and emotional explication leave nothing to the imagination: `You’ve never really figured me out, have you?’ `What I want to know, Charlie, is why?’ ```You what?’’ I said, sounding shocked.’ This, together with clunky period pointers - `It was amazing what you could buy with US dollars 400 back then’- dubious comparisons of McCarthyism to the Holocaust, and anachronistic-sounding genetic determinism, leave the reader longing to be told less, and guess more.

Despite occasional self-deprecating moments and dry asides, even Kennedy’s most vivid characters have a slightly off-the-peg feel. Tough-talking wise-yet-sassy `broads’, Dorothy Parker-style editors and brothers who read quantum mechanics and play `a mean boogie-woogie piano’ add little, and Sara unfortunately fails to see sense and marry her stevedore lawyer, her only chance for a life of love, self-knowledge and foreign food.

As the lawyer explains, `to move forward, we must... come to terms with every damn thing that life throws in our path’. The same, unfortunately, can be said of this novel. Once the tragic revelations accelerate, Kennedy cannot help but write grippingly, and he weaves threads of love and betrayal into a thrillingly masterful ending. Modern novels of private turmoil in a difficult time, from Restoration to Birdsong, work because their protagonists are equal to the events they witness. Kennedy can do millennial messy and Fifties dry, but Sara is merely a mouthpiece for torrents of cool-blooded information: a dull woman in an exciting era, and a sorry foil for her creator’s prodigious story-telling talent.

Reviews courtesy: The Observer News Service